Bria Adimora Godley
University of North Carolina School of Medicine
ABSTRACT
When my father died one year ago, countless friends told me, “I can’t fathom how you’re feeling.” Some resentful part of me replied, “You will.” Now, as COVID-19 ravages the United States, I watch my friends agonize over the risk coronavirus poses to their vulnerable parent
My mother is an infectious disease physician at UNC. She has not had time to mourn a nation in crisis or recognize my father’s memory on the anniversary of his death. To me, our collective dread is all too familiar––it feels like the month between when my father had a heart attack and when he died suddenly. It feels like the hope for a return to normalcy tainted with the threat of imminent danger.
My grief is no longer fresh, but I am close enough to it to understand what others will experience; I am not yet a doctor, but I identify with their sacrifices; and I am not an expert, but I am living with one. In my op-ed, I compare the unrelenting grief of losing a parent to the anticipatory grief of a nation as we brace for a mass tragedy. And I argue that regardless of the apocalyptic tone of the news, it is our responsibility to stay informed because our actions can still save lives.
After the NBA canceled its season but before officials postponed 2020 Olympics, I went into social isolation with an infectious disease physician. My mother specializes in HIV and AIDS, but now her days are consumed by coronavirus. Every morning between 8 and 9 am, I am woken up by the voice of a stranger on a Zoom call announcing how many people in the health care system have tested positive for coronavirus and how many people are currently hospitalized.
Like most Americans, I spent the early days of March engaging in pandemic denial, insistent that the virus would have limited impact on me and my way of life. A bitter part of me resented that the world would grind to a halt over the possibility of deaths from a virus, and yet when my father died one year ago, the world kept turning, unconcerned.
On a March 1, 2019 business trip in California, my previously healthy father woke up in a hotel room alone in the middle of the night with a crushing weight on his chest and had a massive heart attack.
He recovered slowly. He was in the hospital in Los Angeles for ten days before he was cleared to fly home. Though his cardiologist assured us that my father would make a full recovery, he still tired easily. He slept all day. The man who used to hit tennis balls with me for hours could barely tolerate a walk around the grocery store. We all had the uneasy sense that something awful was coming.
The last time my father called me, it was not my father on the other end of the phone, but my mother, telling me to come home right now. My father’s heart had stopped.
It was March 31, 2019. He was 61 years old.
During the first few weeks this spring, as hard as it is to believe now, it seemed as though Americans had avoided the tragedy that had befallen Wuhan and parts of Europe. On March 5, I ran into an infectious disease physician and family friend at a dinner. He told me he had just been on a call with the CDC and WHO about the novel coronavirus.
“What’s the latest?” I asked him, eager for inside information.
“The coronavirus? It’s a pandemic of a lifetime,” he told me distractedly before wandering away. I wish I could say that I took his response seriously then, but of course I did not. I posted the quote to my Instagram story and let the information dissolve after 24 hours.
Amidst the chaos of the COVID pandemic, my mother is energized. She barely has time to read the news. She fields calls from 8am to 10pm. At night I sit on her bed and read Twitter threads with COVID-19 updates to her as she drifts off to sleep. “This is the reason we became infectious disease doctors,” she tells me. “For a moment such as this. The new, the uncharted.” My mother applied into infectious disease in 1983, at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. For a moment I see COVID-19 from her perspective––not just as a slow-moving disaster, but a reason to fight.
But I came to medical school to become a psychiatrist, and I did not sign up for a war.
UNC School of Medicine has suspended rotations until further notice. Newly idle medical students scramble to donate blood and form assembly lines to manufacture our own Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). Fourth year medical students have the opportunity to volunteer in the hospital. I have not stepped foot in the Emergency Department. I know young people can get sick. I have heard the reports of patients as young as thirty on ventilators. I do not want to die.
But there is nowhere I can go to insulate myself from the horrors of our new reality. A friend in New York City tells me she now hears ambulances racing past her window constantly. A friend volunteering in the ED texts me that she just witnessed a patient coughing up blood, waving a bloody rag at her like a distress signal. The internet floods with images of doctors and nurses wearing garbage bags and patient gowns as makeshift PPE.
Virtual meetings intended for updates on PPE assembly devolve into existential questions: What are we going to do? What’s going to happen to our families, our careers? What’s going to happen to us?
For questions on the future, I look to the reporting on the coronavirus outbreak in Italy and Iran. Bodies lined up in hospital hallways, mass graves. I remind my friends that Americans are no exception. And like Italy, we do not have enough masks, ventilators, or doctors.
At dinner one night, I sit at the kitchen table eating leftovers, listening in on my mother’s call with a colleague at Emory. “I have been using the same N95 mask for a week now,” he tells her. I look up so I can catch the expression that accompanies my mother’s silence. For the first time, she looks scared.
When the phone call ends, she says, “That really hurt hearing him say that. It really hurt.”
My med school friends have asked how it is possible that I have maintained relative calm, especially given that I cannot step out of my bedroom without overhearing a coronavirus update. I’ve been grieving for one year now. What they feel, and what has gripped many people across the nation, is anticipatory grief. [1] I know because I felt that same feeling all of last March, when my father would say offhandedly that he had to wear a heart monitor, because his Apple Watch had picked up a “funny rhythm.”
There is always a chance that the United States emerges from this crisis with minimal casualties, but I have seen no evidence to suggest that. Anxiety stems from the ambiguity of not knowing the future. This situation is no longer ambiguous, and I am not anxious anymore––I am angry. I am angry that the failures of our federal government will take people’s loved ones prematurely. I am furious that people will be forced to go through what I went through––what I am still going through––because the leaders elected to protect us in times of crisis do not possess the empathy, courage, or political will to take this threat seriously.
The amount of confusion and misinformation circulating about coronavirus surprises me. Even among friends in the School of Medicine and the School of Public Health, there is an atmosphere of uncertainty; students complain about the disjointed nature of coronavirus news and of the effort required to synthesize the chaos. Our inboxes are inundated with emails from restaurants and stores that we have not visited since college, assuring us that they are “monitoring the situation closely,” even if we are not.
Some of my friends avoid the news, citing mental health concerns. I understand this decision, but I cannot support it; I believe we have a responsibility to ourselves and to each other to stay informed, not just as a symbolic exercise of civic duty, but because our actions can still save lives.
During a rare quiet moment, I check in with my mother to see how she is coping with the pandemic response layered on top of the impending anniversary of my father’s death. “This is such a new disruption that it has forced me to jerk my brain out of old pathways,” she says. “Instead of going through the same self-pitying ‘Oh here I am, it’s Saturday, and I’m alone––‘” she pauses. “I don’t think it’s necessarily as bad for me as it is for some people. It’s strange. It’s not good. But it is different.”
My father was a doctor too. If he were still alive today, I would be paralyzed by the fear of what this virus would do to him and his patches of damaged heart muscle. One of the last times I saw him, he told me, “Goodbye sweetie. I will try to keep getting better, even though you’re not here.” In the weeks and months ahead, more people will lose their fathers and mentors and best friends, but we still have time to save many. We can enact more aggressive quarantine measures, and we can direct factories to produce more masks and ventilators. America is no exception, but we do not have to be a cautionary tale.
Bria Adimora Godley is a fourth-year medical student at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. She can be reached via email at bria_godley@med.unc.edu.
REFERENCES
Berinato, S., That Discomfort You’re Feeling Is Grief. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2020/03/that-discomfort-youre-feeling-is-grief, 2020.